So, I’m now fifty-eight years old. My body feels it, though that’s more residual damage from various health problems than age, but my soul doesn’t: I feel like I’m still who I was when I was five years old, staring at multicolored fish in tide pools, making sand castles and telling myself stories about the freighters I saw steaming past my grandmother’s beach home.
When it comes to my life work, to understand the forces of history and civilization, it’s mostly given me a sense of the pace of change, and a feeling for momentum in human affairs. A human life, even a long one, isn’t very long. Human history operates on generations, with three and seven seeming to be the numbers which matter most.
A normal sub-ideological cycle (New Deal and post-war liberalism, neoliberalism) is about 3 generations. Sometimes they can go longer, but making a bet of about fifty to sixty years for a run will usually work. The changes FDR made stayed substantially in place till 1980 with Reagan. Neoliberalism is dying as we speak. There’s always an overlap period, where the old order is dismantled, but substantial spars remain in place. It takes till the late 90s to repeal the major market reforms of New Deal liberalism, for example.
I was born in 1968. I was twelve when Reagan was elected. I lived the very end of the post-war order, and my entire teenage and adult life has been under neoliberalism. I watched as social services were cut, as every building went from “just walk in” to having security guards. I saw Universities go from being open to the public to closed. I remember the old “middle class” economy and I lived thru the transition to one where the top 10% does over 50% of all spending.
I predicted the ways that the neoliberal order would end, and was right about almost all of it: the rise of China, the end of dollar hegemony, elite capture, the effects of surveillance and electronic money, but in terms of a human life it has all felt like very a long time.
It isn’t, really, in historical terms. Fifty years isn’t very long, unless you’re living thru it.
Young adults today have the same relationship to the 80s and 90s that I do to to the 50s and 60s. They don’t remember them, but they grew up with adults who lived thru them. Heck, I knew adults who remembered the Great Depression, the 20s, World War I and II. My span—what I either experienced myself or what I heard about from people who were there goes from about 1910 to the current year. My teachers included Old Edwardians, Lost Generation types, Hippies and square jawed GI and Silent Generation types.
My parents had me late, so I was really raised mostly not by Boomers, but by the Silent Generation. My father was in training as a pilot when the war ended. Had it gone on another six months he’d have been deployed.
They were very foreign people, not at all like those who are adults today. There was an acceptance of personal violence that has faded, but also a sense of honor which no longer exists. The male adults who were most important in my life were all men whose word you could trust. They might be assholes, many of them were, but if they said they’d do something, they did it. They rarely lied, and they believed in duty and honor.
That’s all gone now in the West. I hardly meet anyone who has principles I trust them to stick to under duress. There isn’t even a pretense any more. Hypocrisy as the tribute vice pays to virtue is gone in America. Trump and the people around him don’t even pretend to be honest, good or honorable. They’re all cruel bastards looking out for number one and willing to hurt or kill anyone, and they don’t even pretend otherwise.
One can see that as preferable to the hypocrisies of Clinton, Bush and Obama, and in some ways it is, but it’s also an indication of how far we’ve fallen, that our lords and masters (and they are our masters, and we are their slaves) don’t even pretend to have any virtues. The only virtue left is being rich or powerful, if you’re neither, you’re nobody and if you’re nobody, in the eternal words of George Bush Jr, “who cares what you think?”
They have, of course, in becoming virtueless scum, destroyed their host nations. Both Europe and America are going down, and hard and it is precisely because of the loss of virtue in the ruling class and the inability and unwillingness of the ruled to do anything about it.
It’s not that you have to be “good”, precisely. It’s that if your culture is lead by people who are cowards, faithless and concerned only with personal wealth and power, well, they can’t run a society effectively. They will always run it into the ground. The punishment for neoliberalism is China’s rise and the end of hundreds of years of European superiority.
And I (and most of my readers) have had to watch this. The destruction of our societies and the aggrandizement of the worst among us. I assume these days that if someone is very successful, either in politics or private enterprise, that they are untrustworthy and effectively a psychopath, and the vast majority of the time, I’m right.
It’s felt very long. I knew it could not last. I knew how it would end. I fought to change it, and failed (no surprise).
This is nothing new, of course. Confucius felt this way, and died convinced he was a failure. “Stop doing all these evil things,” he screamed, and no one listened. The Chinese are good at this. They recognize there are times when public affairs are so evil that good men and women can do nothing but withdraw and try and live good lives, because any success in public affairs can only come at the cost of one’s character. To succeed, to become a billionaire, in America today, is to scream to the heavens “I am evil. I make money hurting people. I care only about myself and perhaps a few friends or family.”
But the torch passes on. China has its problems, but the Chinese leadership has, in fact, mostly made their people far better off. When they say they’ll do something, it isn’t a lie, they track what they do and publish the results against their promises. If they say they’ll build a thousand parks, be sure a thousand parks will be built.
And so it is this I have seen over the span of my life: the civilizational torch passed from the West to the East, from Europe (America is European, sorry) to China. I’ve seen the West lose its virtues, get rid of the civil liberties which were our greatest glory, and in losing its virtues lose its place.
Now we come to the rise of the Chinese century. I wonder how much I’ll see, and how weird it will be to no longer be a member of the important, ruling civilization, but only a barbarian, watching my civilization collapse and the glory and the future move elsewhere.
May the Chinese do more good than evil with their time in the Sun, and may they remember too, that the sun always sets.
And I’ll keep watching, because while most of this has sucked, the one virtue of interesting times is that they are interesting, and age’s great advantage is perspective.
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Jack
Brutally powerful and lovingly honest.
Thanks for capturing and describing our time so eloquently.
tmann
happy birthday.
i.too was born in 1968. my father flew against Japan and N Korea.
they were a different breed, more serious and less brittle.
Dan Kelly
Thank you Ian.
Dan Lynch
Ian said “I was born in 1968. I was twelve when Reagan was elected.
Ah, perhaps that explains why you finger Reagan for the start of neoliberalism, whereas I put most of the blame on our first neoliberal president, Jimmy Carter.
I was 6 when JFK was shot, and yes I remember everything about it.
For me, Vietnam, Jim Crow, and Civil RIghts were the dominant influences as I grew up. Even as children, we frequently discussed the Vietnam war, if for no other reason than because we assumed we would eventually be drafted, and we already had big brothers and uncles who were over there and some of them did not come home.
By chance I was in Memphis when MLK was assassinated, and I remember the National Guard tanks rolling down the streets.
I remember blacks boycotting and picketing a local grocery store. Today, we tend to think of the Civil Rights movement as peaceful marchers holding signs, but actually economic boycotts were perhaps the most effective tactic of the 60’s Civil Rights movement.
I was in junior high when schools integrated, and I had to get up at 6 in the morning to be bussed to a formerly black school on the opposite side of town. (Integration actually went very well and I was proud to be part of it. But since then, a combination of segregation academies and white flight have left Southern public schools more segregated than they were in the 60’s).
My family’s journeys to visit grandma happened to take us through Kent, Ohio, and we had stopped in Kent to eat a time or two, so the Kent State massacre felt very real to me, and still does.
By the time Watergate happened I was very much politically aware, and shed no tears for Tricky Dick. But the economy was relatively good under Nixon and later the beginning of the Carter era, and I had no problem finding summer jobs, and college tuition was trivial. There were many Iranian students at my university, and my roommate was a military brat who had grown up in Iran and who had an Iranian girlfriend, and I heard a lot of stories about how Iran was a wonderful place, and I was vaguely aware the Shah was not popular, though the Iranian students were afraid to talk about it and would change the subject when I asked. Because I had that early positive impression of Iranians, to this day I do not share the common American hatred for Iran. Then came the Iranian revolution (while Carter defended the Shah), inflation, Volker, Carter’s neoliberal austerity, and the job situation went to hell in a hand basket just as I graduated college and attempted to enter the workforce. I had cast my first vote in the ’76 election, for Carter, who was the hopey-changey candidate of his time, but that is one of those votes I wish I could take back. Jimmy was a down to earth, decent, relatively honest person, but his administration was a front for the Trilateral Commission.
So much for reminiscing about our formative experiences. Certainly they shape our worldview.
marku
I’m 73, and the times are definitely getting more interesting-er.
It’s speeding up…….
Feral Finster
I find it interesting how the past is mined. You were born in 1968, the year Led Zeppelin released their first record. That was 58 years ago.
“Nevermind” broke in 1990. That was 36 years ago. It was longer between 1990 and today than 1968 to 1990.
There are still plenty of teenagers who adore Zeppelin and Nirvana. Imagine a teenager in 1968 who listens to the music of 1910, or 1942, for that matter.
Joe
Younger people mine the past because there is no future. The future isn’t right anymore, at least for folk in the US of A. Listen to some middle schoolers and filter out the normal teenage stuff and they know how bleak it looks.
Bill H
I hope the world seems more recognizeable to you when you’re 82 than it does to me today. I doubt it will. We never stop changing as we age.
Eclair
Nice essay, Ian, thank you.
I tend to divide my time on this earth into two eras: Pre- and Post- 9-11.
Six days after my first birthday, the Japanese Air Force bombed Pearl Harbor and my first memories centered around a lack of sugar and my mom and her sister being over the moon when they snagged a pair of nylon stockings. (Both sugar and nylon were ‘needed by the troops!’) And the presence of ration books and did my grandma have enough coupons for a Sunday roast. And the reality that almost every house in the neighborhood had, hanging in their front window, a small silk banner, a white field surrounded by a red border, with a star or two in the center. Most of the stars were blue, representing a son in the military. We passed the houses with the gold stars with reverence: their son had died in battle.
But, despite the wars, WW 2, Korea (which remained a mystery) and Vietnam (which I protested), the trajectory of the country and my community was up. Both my grandmothers acquired electric refrigerators: one replacing her trusty ‘ice-box’ and the other the cold storage box built into the window in her dark pantry. Increasing civil rights, home ownership, new cars, automatic washers and dryers, and ….. television!
We even put the McCarthy hearings behind us. Eventually.
Yeah, I remember, exactly what I was doing when a neighbor rushed over to tell me that Kennedy had been assassinated. But the nation continued on under Johnson.
And, coming from a strong union family, I was mystified by all the ‘revelations’ in the evening paper about how evil all unions were.
But, the break came on September 11, 2001, when I was with my daughter and my 2 week old granddaughter in Hoboken, NJ, standing on the banks of the Hudson and watching the columns of black smoke rise up from the funeral pyre that had been the Two Towers. I remember deliberately not taking photos because I thought it would be disrespectful. Some of my daughter’s neighbors were under that rubble.
The next week I read in disbelief and horror of the creation of the Homeland Security Act. It came seemingly out of nowhere. And the term ‘Homeland’ was one I had not heard applied to our United States. To me, it had overtones of 1930’s Germany. And flying became an anxiety-filled chore, a not a heady adventure.
And, then came the photos of an American young man who had ‘trained to be a terrorist’ in a madrasa, was captured, stripped naked, blindfolded, diapered, and displayed as a warning for the Homeland. Afghanistan, Iraq, ‘shock and awe,’ photos of Saddam being hung, Gadhaffi shot and raped, and now we have become what we practiced on others.
And my granddaughter, two weeks old on September 11, 2001, now a college graduate, trying to find her place in a country where housing is priced beyond reach, where medical care is a mirage, and jobs are increasingly precarious. I try to find comfort in the fact that, for the young, this world is all they have ever known.
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There is no future because the future has been mined. At least the past can still be mined. The future can’t be because it’s been mined out — by humans the world over addicted to growth be those humans Westerners or Easterners or Northerners or Southerners or be they white or yellow or brown or black or red or any color you can name and be they male or female or anything in between and beyond.
I would say your post is a lament of sorts, Ian. It was very conscientious and forthright. It reminds me of the lament from the chairman of Fuyao Glass, Cao Dewang. He’s a real character. Enigmatic, in fact. Repugnant and repulsive on the one hand, yet profoundly introspective on the other hand.
Here’s his lament per the excellent Netflix documentary, American Factory.
The China of my youth was poor and undeveloped. I feel I was happier then. Now I live in a new era of prosperity and modernity, but I have sense of loss. I miss the croaking frogs and chirping bugs of my childhood. The wild flowers blooming in the field. In the past few decades I have built so many factories. Have I taken the peace away and destroyed the environment? I don’t know if I am a contributor or a sinner. But I only think that way when I’m unhappy. The point of living is to work. Don’t you think so?
https://commonreader.wustl.edu/the-broken-hopes-in-american-factory/
The Chairman’s lament, and he likes to be referred to as the Chairman and to present himself as a Chairman Mao knock-off, reveals that China’s material success has come at a great cost — the greatest cost of all perhaps. Happiness. Joy. Contentment. Physical poverty has been reduced and replaced with a poverty of the soul.
https://www.netflix.com/title/81090071
Bryan N Alexander
Well said.
I just turned 59 this month, you kid. 🙂 (Check blog for more – I don’t want to link here if it triggers spam)
The shift east has been an arc of my adulthood, following the Cold War of my youth.
StewartM
Dan Lynch
Ah, perhaps that explains why you finger Reagan for the start of neoliberalism, whereas I put most of the blame on our first neoliberal president, Jimmy Carter.
No, Ian has it right. it was Reagan (and Thatcher). Though Carter did a small part, it was easily recoverable and if it had stopped then, the West would not have declined so. I felt at the time that Reagan’s election might be a catastrophe from which we never recovered; and I think I have been shown to be right.
That’s not to deny that others dented the New Deal. The first major kick to it was by JFK-LBJ, two liberal icons, who lowered the nominal upper tax rate from over 90 % to 70 %; which had the ultimate effective of lowering the top effective tax rate from over 70 % to c. 39 %, a cut of almost half. The reason why neoliberalism triumphed was all that extra money into hands of the rich created a relentless propaganda campaign which turned the word “liberal” into a smear word.
You complain about Carter? Well, the reason why Carter beat Udall in the 1976 primaries was largely that money. That propaganda campaign not only boosted the Reagan insurrection against more traditional conservatives like Ike, but also distorted Democratic politics too. It didn’t help that the “left” back then also blasted liberals from the other flank over Vietnam and other issues.
Nixon did his part too, and we got the first taste of the “unitary executive” branch (aka dictatorship) favored by the Right, their real agenda, as Nixon claimed both that anything the President did wasn’t illegal and also that he could decide whether to spend or not spend money allocated by Congress according to his whim. Every R president since Nixon has expanded these claims to executive power and immunity; it’s not just a Trump thing. They also favored mass surveillance of political enemies.
But Reagan was the point of no easy return. Yes, if a Jessie Jackson had won in 1988 or whatnot, someone who was truly determined to rip Reaganism up by the roots, things might be different. But starting with Dukakis in 1988, the “New Democrats” were ascendant. But why shouldn’t they be? In 1984, the Democrats won an old-style labor Democrat (Mondale) and he got clobbered, yes, and was rejected by white working class voters–particularly men–to boot. In the primaries starting with 1988, the more Conservadem won the nomination usually with the support of working class white Democratic voters.
All the “blame the Dems” stuff is just wrong. Yes, the Dems did go centrist neoliberal, but those Dems were supported by the very working class voters (particularly men, particularly white) that their continuation of R policies hurt (yes, NAFTA and “free trade” and deregulation were also supported by Reagan). Pretty much working class white men crapped in their own beds out of spite to rather than share them with women or non-white men, is essentially what happened. The R propaganda starting even before 1964 played upon racism and misogyny and waved the flag and hoisted the Bible to get working class white men to vote against themselves.
I know this history is unpopular among the economic populist left, but true it is.
StewartM
I’ve been watching the Amazon Rings of Power through a gifted subscription. It’s a TV adaptation of Tolkien’s Silmarillion.
All I can say is that it’s rather amusing to see people complain that Tolkien’s writings are “escapist”. They’re not, not in say a Disney sense where good triumphs in the end and everything is made right again. Oh, no, to me this is like watching the news: it’s awful. You see people all making the wrong decisions, out of short-sightedness, greed, prejudice, Sauron (who the viewer is left guessing which character he is at first) is portrayed as a master of persuasion and deceit, getting people to do the wrong things by manipulating their worst impulses.
You know (because you know the outcome of the story) how this is all going to turn out: in irreparable destruction and the loss of many lives. And you watch it and don’t want to see it happen, you groan “OH NOOO!!” But you watch it as a bystander feeling powerless to do anything to stop it.
And isn’t that the situation we find ourselves in? Yes, we can and should do our part, even when everything seems hopeless—that too is a motif in this story, akin to Gandhi’s saying to “always do the right thing” even when it may not be “your time” to see any effects. But all my adult life has been like watching this TV show, like watching a train wreck in slow-motion where most everyone does all the wrong things for stupid reasons and you can’t stop them. The US I live in today is so far removed from the US of my youth to be almost unrecognizable, and I say that as someone who would heartily agree that the US of my past was still a very flawed society. It just was that during the late 60s and early 70s that we were still moving in the right direction on most things.
But not now, and not since the late 70s.
Jefferson Hamilton
“The point of living is to work. Don’t you think so?”
No, I sure as hell do not.
Eric Anderson
That was a beauty, Ian.
A combination of poignant autobiography and pensive cultural epitaph.
Not an easy feat.
It may be another sign of the times, but very few are honest and clear sighted enough to pull it off.
My hat is off to you, Sir.
bruce wilder
I used to have some fairly accurate idea of what the great mass of Americans were seeing and what they thought and how they would vote. I don’t anymore. That is a change I only really fully registered very recently. I don’t think it is just that I, too, haven’t gotten old and lost touch with the youngs.
A lot of the lived history that the OP and comments are referencing were shared experiences. WWII, the JFK assassination, landing on the Moon, Watergate and Nixon resigning, . . . right up to 9/11 and the second Iraq War. “We” were doing “it” for better or for worse and we witnessed it together.
The Boomers, of which I am one, have had a very different experience of the economy than have the generations that have come after and only a minority of my fellow boomers are even fully aware of how radical is the difference.
The big choices that put the USA on the path followed were made continuously and repeatedly. It is hard not to reify “neoliberalism” as an actor, because all those choices, one after another, seemed to follow a common rationale. Clinton, dismantling the New Deal financial regulatory regime, was certainly a big one.
As far as the disappearance of hypocrisy and integrity, that I attribute to Obama. I voted for him once, and only once. He took away whatever tattered, residual pride I had in my country. I ceased to be a Democrat. Most Democrats swallowed the kool-aid and went off into a virtual reality, where Narrative Wars played out on a 15-minute reel, and politicians aged into the grave.
The possibility of living in a shared reality with my fellow citizens ceased with Obama, imho. Trump was there at the beginning, of course, doing his part with his birther nonsense. From that time onward, propaganda needed no anchor in fact. The Espionage Act would do, in a pinch. Russiagate? – sure have at it!
Ian mentions the disappearance of principles from public life as the root of the loss of integrity. I feel acutely the loss of integrity among public figures and in the public discourse, but I trace its loss to this phenomena of separate realities and competition for narrative dominance. We are not allowed to witness a common reality from differing points of view. History is mined for cosplay opportunities.
I don’t know much about Confucius or “virtue”. I do think a self-governing people has to be able to think about, imagine and discuss principles of governance and commonwealth. If you cannot do that — because it is all a big secret or all representatives, official and otherwise, are captured, or because the People themselves are drowning in propaganda — then we are just on autopilot until we go over the cliff together or separately. Nixon and Reagan took blows against the concept of common cause in government, but it was Obama who simply wiped the possibility of a responsive government away.
Now, I don’t know where “we” in the U.S. or the European West generally are. It is easier to look past my own country’s partisan tug-of-war over reality into the distant politics of Western Europe and those people seem to me to be utterly batshit crazy. If you accept my hypothesis that most politicians (and political commenters) are living attached to a separate, virtual reality, separated from the common, objective reality, that’s not so surprising. War with Russia — how fun! But, having committed to the virtual bizarre reality where that makes sense, then principles like electoral integrity become mere slogans and naked election interference of the most heavy-handed sort becomes standard practice — in Romania, Moldova, Georgia, Hungary.
It is a little harder for an American to comment on issues closer to home, so to speak, without provoking outrage.
mago
Like being poor, old age is one of those things you have to live to know. You can’t explain it to anyone who hasn’t been there or isn’t living it.
My daily life is physically and psychologically demanding beyond my chronological years, but I knew from a young age I was unlikely to have anything to fall back on in my later years, so I made damn sure to learn a few tricks about energy cultivation and maintaining a daily regimen. It’s paid off so far, but everything wears down after a lifetime of use. It’s amazing how resilient the human body is given that it’s basically a fragile conveyance.
On the mental side of things I’ve had the great good fortune to have been introduced to practices rooted in authentic tradition, and to have an environment conducive to such practices.
I also have a head full of memories along with a lot of rock and roll lyrics embedded there. Ha ha.
Yeah, my glory days are gone and while twenty years ago seem like yesterday, there aren’t that many left for me.
What I wish for myself and anyone reading this is to age with grace and dignity. May it be so.
mago
And oh yeah, I’ll never get laid again. I reconciled myself to that a decade ago.
someofparts
I’m older than the rest of you for the most part. Me and those closest to me are on the glide path to our expiration dates. I will be surprised is any of us are here five years from now. The strange thing about it is that as sad as it makes me for my own life to end, mostly I just feel bad for the people who will continue living.
KT Chong
There is an ancient Chinese proverb: “路不拾遗, 夜不闭户,” which translates to:
“No one picks up lost items on the roads, and people do not need to lock their doors at night.”
It originates from the Confucian classic “Liji” (礼记) — the Book of Rites, or, IMO, better translated as the Book of Conducts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Rites
In the 9th chapter, “Li Yun” (礼运) — “Conveyance of Rites” or “Conveyance of Conducts” — disciple Ziyou asks Confucius: How do we know if a ruler is virtuous?
The Master replies:
“… People do not engage in intrigue or trickery, nor do they engage in robbery, theft, and rebellion… Thus in a well-governed world, people do not pick up lost goods on the road… people leave their houses, they do not close their doors, nor the doors are barred at night.”
So I present you… more Chinamaxxing.
These ten YouTube short videos were uploaded by foreign expats and tourists in different cities across China.
• China is a safe country for visitors
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEE0N3o0VQk
• Why China Feels Safer Than Europe or the USA？
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spd-9lTVfhI
• Unattended Delivered Lunch in China Will Not be Stolen!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEPnnVmaXIY
• Unattended luggages in China, an underground shopping complex next to a train station.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDymdmA8h38
• Can you imagine leaving your phone, bags, and valuables unattended？
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9mMxaIlVTU
• Only in China would I leave my phone in public… and it’s still there when I come back!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEqI2NdMRXY
• What happens if you leave your Laptop unattended in a cafe in China?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNeq2OBwpm0
• Blogger stunned by Chinese shopping mall due to the fact that all products are unattended at night!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOxg8caDsJo
• People just leave a bunch of cash unattended like that in China 😂
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34tvsR35Rwc
• DARE: Leave Your Bag Unattended for 1 HOUR in China. The Result… 😱
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKIs_oTTgiQ
Ray
> My span—what I either experienced myself or what I heard about from people who
> were there goes from about 1910 to the current year
I was born in 1966, and sometimes feel amazed at that span. It seems like I have direct experience with those who are from the “old times” to the new.
Even as a kid in the 60s and 70s, there was enough old stuff around to keep reminding you: old vehicles, buildings, often little to no services, and of course people.
Also, the difference in morals and ethics, the whole notion of living by a code, stands out. Some of it I don’t miss, like overbearing religious legalism,
My kids have no idea what most of that felt like, and mostly think I am an obsessively demanding freak. :-).
Jan Wiklund
1. The Chinese will probably be decent until they are squarely in the saddle, then they will probably behave like the Americans. The Americans were also fairly decent in the 30s, for example, at least the Asians thought so, and some of their leaders like Nehru or Ho said so too. But states and corporations are always selfish, and do what pays best.
2. One should not only blame the rich. They were equally bad around 1900, but in some way there were strong opponents, both individuals and social movements, that made themselves matter, sometimes with bitter struggle. They seem to be gone now. Those who think they are in opposition prefer starting a blog, or even worse, organize an NGO for “councelling” the powerful about small things
for money. THAT is the big difference, not that the rich nowadays are any worse than John D Rockefeller.
Alan Sutton
“The point of living is to work. Don’t you think so?”
“No, I sure as hell do not.”
Thank you Jefferson Hamilton.
Surely the point of the increase in productivity is to free us from work.
Or to increase profits.
As always it depends on who owns the means of production doesn’t it?
Alan Sutton
“Ian mentions the disappearance of principles from public life as the root of the loss of integrity”
Thank you Bruce Wilder.
The problem is that once the evil enemy decide that integrity no longer matters it seems foolish to adhere to it.
That is one of the many weaknesses of the left.
Once morality is left behind anybody that clings to it will be swept away.
Corbyn is the prime example of that. He couldn’t believe that anyone would believe he was an anti semite. But maybe some did and look what happened to him.
Morality, like everything else, has been weaponised.
Ian Welsh
It really varies. Being moral is often an advantage because people trust you, and moral organizations often out-compete non-moral organizations. We didn’t invent all this morality stuff because it reduces competitiveness, societies which have it usually out-perform societies that don’t.
This is, fundamentally, why China has out-competed the US, actually.
breac
i’m 58 too, so this resonates.
i argue with a guy who’s half a generation younger than me, so he has no before time, before neoliberalism.
so his whole world is the private is better/more efficient etc than the public, unless categorically proven otherwise, and that’s very high bar.
concomitantly, he thinks politics is a ‘circus’ and that tech is the solution to everything.
he talks like power and wealth don’t exist, which makes sense if the ideological water you’ve swum in your entire life is solely about the individual, the job creator etc etc.
so he’s very easy pickings for the oligarchs.
ilpalazzo
On a lighter note, I had my thoughts about getting old recently too although I am still a bit younger than Ian. I was often wondering why my father donned his long johns for a colder half of the year at all times and here I started doing the same and became a kind of long johns afficionado. I realise I am becoming more and more like my father and this is both a happy and sad feeling.
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No, I sure as hell do not.
Same, JH, same.
Yes, morality perhaps plays its part but as much as that if not much more, Chairman Cao’s maxim of “we live to work” also plays its part. I guess for many Chinese, the purpose of life is to work is a matter of morality. It’s not my morality and obviously not JH’s morality. In my estimation, there is no purpose to life. Life just is. Any purpose is subjectively, and conveniently, ascribed to it.
I like Tuco’s question related to work. It strikes at the core of Cao’s lament.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pj3dKmAn2Ss
ilpalazzo
@ianwelsh.net on my feed today:
https://social.vivaldi.net/deck/@pdimagearchive@mastodon.social/116125504422878313
someofparts
StewartM –
“Pretty much working class white men crapped in their own beds out of spite to rather than share them with women or non-white men, is essentially what happened.”
nailed it
Mark Level
A fine reminiscence, I’ve got 8 years on Ian, but my parents were also Silent Generation, very intelligent people but deeply, deeply conformist, “Behave and dress and talk just like everyone else, don’t stand out in general, and you will be liked and accepted” was their belief. Extremely stultifying. Growing up in the 1970s, graduating High School 1977, I knew this was absurd, my assumptions about the world were nothing like theirs, and it enraged my dad that I didn’t have his mid-20th century values (including casual racism.)
Dan Lynch has several years on me, but I was a bright little nerd, paid attention to the news and politics, so my take on the funk leading up to Reaganism is quite similar to his. When I was a young teenager, the first thing to rescue my point of view from my parents’ hamster-wheel striving was Mad comics. Not the magazine, though I enjoyed that also, but the Comics from the mid-50s were reprinted in little magazine/booklets that you could buy at the drug store for like 75 cents. The Jewish, outsider satirical take perfectly represented the way I saw the absurd social world, Harvey Kurtzman was a brilliant mid-level satirical mind, it’s overly obvious in retrospect but as a 14 year old it really hit my sweet spot.
We were on a family trip the day MLK was shot, to Chicago. I remember my parents suddenly got very scared, told us curtly (but not in full panic) to get in the car, lock the doors and don’t get out. We were out of the city and headed back to suburbia quickly. Being the oldest of 3, I’m the only one who remembered and put the pieces together later, my younger siblings didn’t recall this at all, and my parents didn’t talk about it.
My dad was deeply reactionary, but since all his numerous relatives were poor people in the Dakotas, and Catholic, they all leaned socialist Left. I’d like to share my take on Jimmy Carter. I was not old enough to vote for him, but was enthusiastic about him and volunteered for the campaign. He fooled me just as he fooled Hunter S. Thompson, his “friend”, who really should’ve kept his usual cynicism on this issue. Carter was very quickly converted to Neoliberalism early in his term, I used to have a big, thick book, History in Quotations, by 2 British authors (at least 800 pp., it tried to cover everything from very ancient history up to 2000), the Carter entry featured an early speech in office to the effect that “Government really can’t do anything for us, business is the driver of prosperity, we should be good citizens and focus on faith and family . . . ” Pre-Mitt Romney-think. Carter did a few good things, the Amnesty for young American men who’d left for Canada and elsewhere was what stands out in my memory. His foreign policy was terrible and ended his Presidency in disgrace. Zbig Brzenski funding the original Mujahadeen, throwing acid in girls faces and fighting those dastardly Reds for religious fundamentalist Islam. (Not that in any way I selectively support bigger powers invading and occupying smaller countries, that never ends well.) We saw the results later, on 9/11. His disastrous failed raid to rescue the Embassy “hostages” was the end of the line, and he handed it over to the full-on Right. As Harry Truman observed long ago, voters will go for a Real Right Wing demagogue if offered aside a namby-pamby Lib fake, that’s why the R’s get to be the Daddy Party and the Harlem Globetrotters, while the D’s are the pretend Mommy Party that loses and copies the daddies.
It’s true that back in the 70s, men and women who said they’d do something did so 95% of the time and you could generally trust people. I had one uncle who was a scam artist later in his career, it came back to legal charges and he barely avoided jail, but this was an exception and far from the rule.
The hippy thing was too far in the rear-view mirror to interest me; I liked some of the Eastern spirituality stuff some peddled, also the music was pretty good for the most part, I loved the Who and hated the dumb MOR crap mostly, but the break to Punk in ’77 was super-refreshing and things felt real culturally for the first time. “No Future.” I may not have known about the Powell memo at that time, but somebody did. Malcolm McClaren was just a cultural shock artist, the Ramones were much more just young, alienated dudes who saw through the bullshit and called it out in a simple, clear aesthetic way, short sharp shock, most songs 1-2 minutes. Johnny was a reactionary shithead, but he was the exception, super-patriot, when they got into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame he famously said, “God Bless the USA and God Bless President Bush.” He stole Joey’s girlfriend, which at least led to the song “The KKK Took My Baby Away.” By the time I was in college I also had several Iranian friends, I had a Pakistani roomate my first year of college. A shame that the Muslim countries were just US prey.
I had to support myself starting at age 19, as a white guy (mostly) it was not difficult. Some poverty but never homeless or hungry, blue collar scrabble toughened me up. I learned to fight (& not be bullied) after I threw my Class privilege card away. In the Merchant Marine in the Gulf of Mexico age 20, I had a co-worker who hated me for being a “Yankee” (I’d never been to New England then, only once since) and a “n—–r-lover.” Battered in my first fight, back and forth in the 2nd, when I won the 3rd I was accepted (not necessarily respected) and left unmolested. There was one guy on the boat who was less popular than me, a fat Vietnam War Veteran named Billy, who bragged about killing children in Vietnam to us, “Yes, I killed little gooks. Little Gooks become big Gooks.” We collectively named him Hillbilly, as I said, even the formerly middle-class educated me got more respect than he did. (I only had to fight once in later life, since I’m neither a drunk nor a bellicose type. Having an affair with a rather attractive German woman who had 2 children, and the husband came after me. Luckily I lived in a collective weirdos house, musicians, anarchists, girls who did strip-tease, and my roommates intervened to break it up, one big guy who got between us was knocked down by W, the aggrieved party, and that was the biggest injury of the tussle, W apologized to me later through his wife and the affair was on and off for a couple years after.
One works to live, one shouldn’t live to work. A strong work ethic was (practically but not literally) beat into me when I was a child.
I never could’ve traveled from Texas to Nicaragua overland and volunteer coffee-picked with the Sandinistas in 1983-84 if not for a motorcycle accident in which I was not at fault, got a decent reward because a friend from the Central America Solidarity movement was a lawyer, filed a pro-bono suit for me and I got $1200 from the settlement, a small fortune at the time. (My bike was totaled, I sailed through the air and it is true time stops, your whole life flashes before you, I had time to fear I’d be permanently disabled. I was wearing a helmet, ended up with a cracked rib, nothing more serious, some upper body bruising. At the ER, the asshole doctor wouldn’t give me any pain relief. I was a short-haired, tough-looking Punk, but somehow came up on his radar as incipient druggy. Never liked downers or feeling stupid, actually.)
Seeing an actual cooperative and revolutionary society was life-changing, as well as connecting with my Castillian origins by learning the language. (Mom was ashamed of her dark skin, wouldn’t talk about it, only a great-aunt had told me the truth.) I’m saddened that Nicaragua has given up most of the revolutionary fervor it had then, it’s now a family dynasty with the laws against woman’s bodily autonomy as bad as neighboring Honduras. You can change people’s economic status, in that part of the world, stupid Bad Religion means “Woman is the Nigger of the World,” to quote a John Lennon song. One morning when we were about to sing the National Anthem before picking, there were 3 young gay guys, 1 of them cross-dressed, who were making out and being polyamorous. Nobody blinked an eye, nobody yelled at them, they were simply respected as fellow workers.
Gotta respect Mago’s take, yes, it’s tough. I had a quick whirlwind romance with a woman nearly 20 years younger than me when I was 58, I knew even at the time that was probably it. Body’s still hanging in there, mind too for now. My grandmother lived to be 99.5, she was fully blind and nearly deaf but the last time I saw her she knew exactly who I was, remembered my birthday and everything else as well as the other 27 grandchildren she had. My parents were long-lived too, dad made it to 87 despite being obese by his 40s and a spinal injury that put him in a walker for some time; mom made it to 88 but the Alzheimer’s her final 15 years was devastating. Grandma used to observe “Old age isn’t for sissies.” Not too PC in her days. Her husband died young, like 54.
Yeah, America (or Trumpistan) is doomed, pretty near everyone but some in the billionaire class knows it (coz it’s not doomed for them.) Full-on Feudalism and mass homelessness and early deaths coming soon, it’ll look like Russia in the early 90s soon enough. (But L&S won’t be happy about it this time, when the average life span drops 7-8 years in 3 or 4 years, people are selling their children so as not to starve, etc.)
But hey, it’ll still be better than the UK!!!
marku
“This is, fundamentally, why China has out-competed the US, actually.”
The morality of building something versus asset stripping it.
bruce wilder
I just wanted to say that I really enjoyed reading the personal reflections. Thank you to those who shared.
ProNewerDeal
Happy Birthday, Ian. You are wise insightful commentator. I appreciate your writing on your site here. All the best wishes.
different clue
. . . ” I know this history is unpopular among the economic populist left, but true it is. ” . . .
It was true for the Presidential-aspirational part of the DemParty. It was not true for the House of Reps-aspirational part of the DemParty. ( I don’t remember about the Senate-aspirational part of the DemParty).
In the 1980 election, McComb County in Michigan was almost caricatured as a “BellWhether Reagan-Democrat” County because its White union member DemParty voters voted so heavily for Reagan. Yet those very same White union member DemParty voters voted for Representative David Bonior at the very same time in the very same election. Bonior was what passed for Firm Left in American politics .. . same as Marcy Kaptur, same as Dennis Kucinich, and some others that I don’t remember. They were all against Free Trade in general and against NAFTA, WTO, etc. in particular.
And as long as the House of Reps remained majority DemParty, the House of Reps kept voting down every Free Trade Agreement that Reagan/Bush tried moving.
Here is a little something about David Bonior.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bonior
As I sat here typing, another old political memory began floating into view. I checked it on line to see if I remembered right. And I did. Lyndon Johnson took Tennessee in 1964. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_United_States_presidential_election
How did he do that? My memory is that Goldwater threw it away when he said he would sell the TVA to private investors. I remember billboards here and there saying:
” Tennessee is TVA Country”. And it was.
It was Clinton in particular who figured out how to move just enough newer-ish DemParty Reps towards Free Trade to get NAFTA/ WTO/ MFN for China/ etc. passed.
And Clinton’s singular political achievement was to burn down the DemParty majority in the House and create the enduring DemParty minority in the House we have mostly had unto this day. There was even a book written about that . . . The Selling of Free Trade.
The Selling of Free Trade
NAFTA, Washington, and the Subversion of American Democracy
https://www.ucpress.edu/books/the-selling-of-free-trade/paper
( Here, just for gits and shiggles, is a little sarcastic saying I remember from the 1972 election . . . Don’t change dicks in the middle of a screw, Nixon-Agnew in ’72! “)
Anyway, I was born in 1957 in Knoxville, Tennessee and lived there till 1972. ( When I was born there were still only 48 states in the United States. Imagine that.) Then we moved North where I have been since then, one way or another. Physically I lived in a normal-seeming suburb, buy psycho-mentally I lived in kind of a cave. How much was strictly family-created as against how much was wider-bubble created by Knoxvilled itself was an interesting question. I remember hearing zero about the Cuban Missile Crisis at the time. I remember hearing zero about the Kennedy assassination. Not mentioned at home, not mentioned at school. I certainly don’t remember any Moment of Silence or flags-at-half-staff at Pond Gap Elementary School. ( Which was on Paper Mill Road. Maybe someday I will go back and visit Knoxville).
Anyway, when you’re having fun, the hours pass like minutes. When you’re having pain, the minutes pass like kidneystones.
After some more comments build up, I might offer a more-personal less-political comment about things and stuff from back then and later but still semi-long-ago, as against things and stuff more recently.